A recent major study by The Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief described a “broad and deep abyss” in access to painkillers between rich countries and poor ones. Donald McNeil, global health reporter for the New York Times, came with us to Uganda and Kenya to report on the status of pain relief in Africa.

The Pain-Free Hospital Initiative is a low-cost approach to integrating pain relief into service delivery in a hospital setting through widespread training of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists in the basic assessment and management of pain.

This simple training can be done through a series of lunchtime sessions without taking staff out of post.

There are many ways to approach the problem of limited access to essential pain medicines. Our work centers on the mechanism of access approach and we've developed a MORPHINE framework to describe how we think about and tackle problems in different countries.

The world is full of problems we can't solve. Millions suffer from diseases that will require new discoveries or inventions to treat. But more than 200 years ago, we developed a safe, plentiful, inexpensive, and effective drug to safely treat moderate or severe pain.